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Bits of History (of Bits) on the Auction Block

IN the spring of 1946, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly sent out a business plan for a company that would sell "electronic computors." In their eight-page proposal for financing, sent to a handful of prospective backers, the two engineers predicted that the market for such a machine might consist of scientific laboratories, universities and government agencies.

Such were the beginnings of the Electronic Control Company of Philadelphia, which produced the Univac, the first computer to be sold commercially in the United States.

On Wednesday, Christie's New York will auction the original typescript of the Eckert-Mauchly proposal. The auction house estimated it could sell for as much as $70,000.

The Eckert-Mauchly business plan is being sold as a part of a collection called "The Origins of Cyberspace." The collection, viewable online at christies.com, consists of about 1,000 books, papers, brochures and other artifacts from the history of computing. The items include an early-19th-century manuscript on the Jacquard loom by Joseph Marie Jacquard and a reel of magnetic tape used in the Univac.

A da Vinci codex is one thing, but few people could have predicted that a 1947 mimeograph titled "A Tentative Instruction Code for a Statistical Edvac" would be estimated to fetch from $8,000 to $12,000 at a formal auction.

"It's becoming the new frontier in scientific collecting," said Thomas Lecky, a vice president at Christie's who is overseeing the auction.

The collection belongs to Jeremy M. Norman of Novato, Calif., a 59-year-old rare-book dealer who has been buying materials related to the history of computing since 1970.

Mr. Norman's collection will first be offered as a single lot, subject to a reserve price of about $1.2 million. If the reserve is not met, the collection will be offered as individual lots.

Mr. Norman comes from a family of book collectors. His father, Haskell F. Norman, who died in 1996, was a collector of rare medical and scientific texts.

Like his father, Jeremy Norman is known for being a shrewd and swift collector.

Erwin Tomash, a collector who lives in Soquel, Calif., recalled that four years ago he saw a dealer was selling a rare journal from 1842 containing the first published account of the logical design of Charles Babbage's analytical engine, a mechanical calculator. The price was $600.

"When I phoned the dealer, he said: 'You're too late. Jeremy Norman bought it 20 minutes ago,"' Mr. Tomash said. Mr. Norman has set his reserve for the item at $10,000.

For example, a book titled "High-Speed Computing Devices," a 1950 treatise on how to build a digital computer, has a reserve price of $800. Mr. Norman's copy is a first edition with a dust jacket. But at bookfinder.com more than two dozen copies of the book are for sale by various vendors, ranging in price from $60 to $275 (most without a dust jacket).

"I have three copies of this book and I paid a good deal less than $800," said Michael Williams, head curator of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. "Is it worth $800 to have one with a dust jacket?"

Pricing much of the material is difficult. This has to do in part with the fact that the history of computing as a subject for collectors is still emerging. And many of the items in this collection are one of a kind. "Most of these things have never been sold at auction before, and many will never be sold again," Mr. Norman said.

The circle of those who collect computer-related arcana is relatively small. So far as Mr. Tomash knows, he is the only serious private collector of computer history materials besides Mr. Norman.

Mr. Lecky said two items in particular had generated interest among prospective bidders: the Eckert-Mauchly business plan and a technical journal containing the idea for TCP/IP, the standard by which information is transmitted over the Internet.

Mitchell D. Kapor, founder and chairman of the Open Source Applications Foundation, a software research group in San Francisco, is interested in bidding on the Eckert-Mauchly plan, but said he would not bid more than the $70,000 range.

Mr. Lecky frequently works with the PBS program "Antiques Roadshow," where he sits at a table and appraises all manner of questionable heirlooms. If someone had approached him 10 years ago with the May 1974 issue of IEEE Transactions on Communications, the engineering journal in which the TCP/IP paper appeared, he would have scratched his head. "You don't really know when history is being made," he said. "You can imagine someone getting the Eckert and Mauchly business plan, a solicitation for funds to support this new company, and how many things just like it crossed a banker's desk that they would immediately discard."

Mr. Kapor said he would not be surprised if the bidding on some of the rarer items was to escalate. "It just takes one random billionaire with too much time and money to make it a circus," he said, before correcting himself: "No, it takes two."

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A version of this article appears in print on February 17, 2005, on Page G00005 of the National edition with the headline: Bits of History (of Bits) On the Auction Block. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe